Polypheme

After just one generation, Socket FM1 is dead. We test six Socket FM2-based motherboards able to take AMD's newest APUs built using the Trinity architecture. Can any of these platforms, armed with AMD A85X Fusion Controller Hubs, get us to upgrade?

Polypheme

[citation][nom]Sakkura[/nom]Sneaky, lol. Now he's going to be downvoted.[/citation]Not sneaky, I just see a lot of sniping in here. I checked the article and didn't find it, and I really need to find it before I can gripe at the person who made the final revisions to this article. His comment could be completely false for all I know...

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[citation][nom]buzznut[/nom]And I would penalize Asrock for the brown PCB. Its an otherwise nice looking board, but this is a trend I don't care for.[/citation]
Penalizing a company over a PCB's color is asinine and petty. Even if you have a case with an acrylic window, do you stare into your PC all day and night? If so, that is trend I don't care for.

There are much more important things to worry about, like quality, price, and features, to name a few...

Contributing Editor

[citation][nom]looniam[/nom]"Adoby Creative Suite"just one? who cares, good job to crash and the rest of the crew . . .edit: i had to fix a typo . .oh karma![/citation]
Heh, apparently, editing motherboard round-ups in a Thanksgiving food coma is not conducive to catching typos. Got that one as well--thanks looniam!

Titan

Is it just me or is there no list of prices for the boards? There's relative price, and some board is worth $25 more than another (which is enough if you want to do half a page of simultaneous equations), but I can't find an actual list.

Contributing Editor

[citation][nom]americanbrian[/nom]Why no GPU OC as has been requested many times? This platform allows easy GPU OC's as mentioned in your previous PD articles. You still have never posted your 1GHz+ clocked GPU results. I am also upset that you didn't run the gaming benches with the OCed RAM. I want to know how a PROPERLY configured setup like this could perform.8% gains approx from going to 1866 over 1600, does higher clocks after this have any effect?How does OCing the GPU part limit your CPU clock OCs? or is the heat not too bad ? So many questions unanswered....[/citation]
These sound like great ideas for a platform-oriented story. In fact, Thomas and I have discussed doing a piece on memory and Trinity. Maybe we could expand that to include an exploration of graphics and processor bottlenecks, too. Thanks for the feedback!

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[citation][nom]buzznut[/nom]And I would penalize Asrock for the brown PCB. Its an otherwise nice looking board, but this is a trend I don't care for.[/citation]
Well, in days gone by we'd have had green or gold boards. To be perfectly honest though, unless you're going to have a side window, you're not likely to care about the PCB colour. I'm far more interested in features and performance than the aesthetics, personally.

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[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]Why don't you point to where you see that?[/citation]

Here is a relevant quote from a randomly-googled article:

Longtime Elder Scrolls fans hoping Skryim would take full advantage of the PC's strengths: unfortunately we have to disappoint you. Game director Todd Howard says besides higher quality textures and bigger resolutions, it "looks the same" as on consoles, and it's "mostly a DirectX 9 game in terms of how the shaders work."

He does note DirectX 11 support is a possibility down the line, however: "When it comes to DirectX 11 there are things they get us for free, like performance gains. You’re going to get performance gains out of it versus an older version. But the specifics DX11 does, like tessellation and all that kinda stuff, we aren’t taking advantage of that right now. That doesn’t mean we won’t in the future. We aren’t right now because we want to author it so it looks great.”

On the bright side, the new engine means Skyrim looks quite lovely as is, just nothing mind-blowing, which it could be. No doubt the modding community will improve the situation before long, though.

Illustrious

[citation][nom]Bentonsl_2010[/nom]Here is a relevant quote from a randomly-googled article:Longtime Elder Scrolls fans hoping Skryim would take full advantage of the PC's strengths: unfortunately we have to disappoint you. Game director Todd Howard says besides higher quality textures and bigger resolutions, it "looks the same" as on consoles, and it's "mostly a DirectX 9 game in terms of how the shaders work."He does note DirectX 11 support is a possibility down the line, however: "When it comes to DirectX 11 there are things they get us for free, like performance gains. You’re going to get performance gains out of it versus an older version. But the specifics DX11 does, like tessellation and all that kinda stuff, we aren’t taking advantage of that right now. That doesn’t mean we won’t in the future. We aren’t right now because we want to author it so it looks great.”On the bright side, the new engine means Skyrim looks quite lovely as is, just nothing mind-blowing, which it could be. No doubt the modding community will improve the situation before long, though.[/citation]

He wasn't asking for proof of what DX is utilized by Skyrim, he was asking where in the article was it claimed that Skyrim used DX11.

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Titan

That 16C over ambient on the ASRock board is a little worrisome. That looks like the only real outlier in all the measurements. Was that at stock clocks, or with the OC?
As far as performance goes, there doesn't appear to be any difference worth noting (which I'd expect).

Polypheme

[citation][nom]Onus[/nom]That 16C over ambient on the ASRock board is a little worrisome. That looks like the only real outlier in all the measurements. Was that at stock clocks, or with the OC?As far as performance goes, there doesn't appear to be any difference worth noting (which I'd expect).[/citation]Stock clocks. I think you'll be OK so long as your room isn't over...60C? No computing in saunas?

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$210 for board+CPU combo that doesn't play Skyrim well on any sort of reasonable settings. Assume adding something like a 7850 2GB for better gaming performance. Contrast that with $270 for a 2500k+ASRock board, same 7850, and you are going to blow away the performance of the A10 in every single benchmark and probably run any modern game at max settings. There is no reason anyone should be an AMD APU for gaming, period.

Illustrious

[citation][nom]Teslarifle[/nom]$210 for board+CPU combo that doesn't play Skyrim well on any sort of reasonable settings. Assume adding something like a 7850 2GB for better gaming performance. Contrast that with $270 for a 2500k+ASRock board, same 7850, and you are going to blow away the performance of the A10 in every single benchmark and probably run any modern game at max settings. There is no reason anyone should be an AMD APU for gaming, period.[/citation]

It's not a high-end nor even a mid-ranged option... Honestly, I wouldn't put any of these boards in an APU system. I reserve APU systems mostly for very low-budget entry level gaming systems and I tend to throw in one of the cheapest boards around for that (IE $40-60, ASRock had an awesome deal for a decent A75 board at $40 a while ago and it as perfect for such systems).

For example, an A10-5800K with the ASRock FM2A75M-DGS and Xigmatek Gaia cooler can be had for a mere $~195. That's a decent CPU, entry-level GPU, and entry-level motherboard with a cooler for some minor to moderate overclocking. Throw in an Antec VP-450 that can be had as cheap as ~$32 and a cheap case such as the Rosewill Redbone/Blackbone U3 or RoseWill challenger (can be had as cheap as $25-45 depending on deals, at least one of them is usually around $30) and you almost have an entire computer for a little over $250. All you need at that point is a storage drive or two (can be had for around $40-60 each), possibly also an optical disk drive (which can usually be had for about $10 thanks to combo deals from Newegg with many Rosewill cases) and all that's left is memory. A decent DDR3-1600-2133 8GB kit can usually be had for $30-45 and you can spend less than $300-350 for an entire entry-level gaming machine.

Not everyone has the money to spend on a mid-ranged to high end system. If this is all that someone can afford, a very common situation, then it is what that someone is likely to consider buying. Good luck making a similarly performing Intel system for less money. Oh, and don't bother with a Pentium or Celeron, it turns out that they're almost as good as i3s in synthetic comparisons, but a real world comparison leaves them being junk compared to even low-end AMD triple and quad core models:

discrete gaming performance with Radeon 7950 800MHz Catalyst 12.3:

Even the best Pentium, the Pentium G2120, can't touch AMD's Athlon II x4-comparable models such as the Llano A8s and Phenom II x4 850 in real-world performance (the FPS was calculated in average frame latency instead of average FPS for a more accurate representation of the experience's smoothness than FPS can provide and granted it's still not perfect, it's much closer to perfection than measuring in average FPS). You'd also have to throw in at least a Radeon 6670 DDR3 or similarly performing discrete graphics card for the Intel systems because their IGPs can't keep up.

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[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]These sound like great ideas for a platform-oriented story. In fact, Thomas and I have discussed doing a piece on memory and Trinity. Maybe we could expand that to include an exploration of graphics and processor bottlenecks, too. Thanks for the feedback![/citation]
Pretty please with sugar on top?

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